Bush team, Mexico bicker over semi-auto ban renewal
January 15, 2009

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

Gunowners in America have been waiting for the incoming Obama Administration to drop the other shoe ever since the president-elect started to appoint a number of known anti-gunners to his new Cabinet and advisory staff.

President-elect Barack Obama’s reassurances aside, as reported elsewhere on this page, his selection of firearms civil rights opponents such as Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff, Hillary Rodham Clinton as his secretary of state and Eric Holder as his attorney general have tended to raise gunowner concerns.

Certainly the recent consumer rush to buy up military-style semi-automatic rifles and handguns shows that the public expects a renewal of the ban on so-called assault weapons and some legislation to limit handguns to be top priorities of the new White House which will take office on Jan. 20. Curiously, such a drive comes at a time when more and more companies are developing new and better variants of AR 15 and similar military-origin semi-automatics, as can be seen by some of Gun Week’s SHOT Show 2009 preview reports in this issue.

While the Brady Campaign would be happy to have any anti-gun initiative rolling on Capitol Hill, it would certainly be delighted with a new ban on semi-autos, particularly one that would not have a sunset provision as the Clinton-Biden ban did. The sunset provision proved a very sensible route. Ten years after the ban was enacted, it was allowed to expire by the Congress and the White House, both of which could find that the ban had any impact on crime statistics while in force.

But now, new international voices have been added to the choir of the apostles of gun prohibition.

Mexican Pressure
The Houston Chronicle reported that a senior US law enforcement official said on Dec. 19 that the Bush Administration never assessed whether a decade-long assault weapon ban had reduced the flow of high-powered guns into the hands of Mexican drug gangs.

“I don’t think we’ve ever really tracked it,” said William McMahon, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Since the expiration of the ban in 2004, Mexican drug syndicates have built up their stockpiles, Mexican officials say. They have long maintained that the weapons—many bought in Texas and smuggled into Mexico—have escalated the country’s drug-fueled violence that has killed more than 5,400 people this year.

US officials, by contrast, have insisted that the overriding challenge is to stem the relentless flood of illegal narcotics to American users.

The controversy flared last month when the US secretary of state and the Mexican foreign minister appeared at a joint news conference.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the ban’s expiration had no bearing on Mexico’s violence.

“I follow arms trafficking across the world, and I’ve never known illegal arms traffickers who cared very much about the law,” Rice said. “And so I simply don’t accept the notion that the lifting of the ban somehow has led arms traffickers to increase their activity.”

But Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa said authorities in her country would favor restoration of the ban.

“If on the US side there were a legislative decision to adopt an initiative like that, we would obviously be very attentive to that,” she said, couching her nation’s interest in typical diplomatic jargon.

Gun rights’ groups suspect that President-elect Barack Obama may try to revive the ban on some automatic weapons, The Chronicle said, ignoring the fact that automatic arms—including real “assault weapons” as defined by the Pentagon—have been strictly controlled in the US since 1934.

Transition Team
However, the newspaper did report that Obama’s transition team listed “making the expired federal assault weapons ban permanent” as one of the goals of the incoming administration.

Rice and Espinosa met to coordinate implementation of the first phase of the Merida Initiative. The three-year, $1.4 billion US assistance program was crafted by President George W. Bush to help Mexico combat the drug-smuggling gangs.

Of the initial $400 million due Mexico under the Merida Initiative, $340.2 million has been cleared for distribution. But timetables for equipment procurement and spending schedules mean that none of the direct assistance has reached Mexico so far, said a State Department official speaking on condition of anonymity.

Aside from the issue of US support for Mexico’s campaign against the drug cartels, one wonders if the incoming Obama Administration will be more attentive to international advice on the firearms civil rights issue. If so, Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, will be in a position to support anti-gun initiatives at the hemispheric and global levels.

Apparently, of greater importance than short-circuiting the importation of drugs into the US from Mexico, Central and South America is the issue of preventing Americans from protecting themselves with modern firearms, if not on a par with those used by the military, at least more up-to-date than grandpa’s old 8-shot M1 Garand.

And even if the US renewed a ban on so-called assault weapons, there appears little likelihood that it would stem either the flow of illicit drugs into the US from Mexico and other areas south of the border, or of reducing the carnage in Mexico itself.

Ban Irrelevant
A ban on semi-automatic firearms, or even some semi-automatic firearms, is irrelevant to the drug problem in this country and in neighboring nations.

People who kill and maim—even behead squads of soldiers as happened in Mexico in December—couldn’t care less about US gun prohibitions any more than they do about US drug laws. They know they can always get all the guns they want—including machineguns, submachineguns and RPGs—from Cuba, Columbia and Peru, as well as other hemispheric neighbors, many of which supply the drugs they or their agents sell in the US. In many cases, the arms they need for their illegal businesses will come from the same countries where they acquire their tons of drugs.

However, the voices of politically acceptable foreign governments will be used by anti-gun American politicians to prop up their arguments that such new gun laws would improve America’s relations with other countries and burnish the image of the US abroad. Why either is desirable, I’m not sure. But it will make for more new headlines, and for footnotes in any future debate about the advisability of enacting a new ban on popular modern firearms.

The big question may be: if such a new ban is passed and signed into law, will it include a grandfather clause for those millions of similar firearms that Americans already possess. If not, we would be in for a lot more trouble than our present economic crisis.

Such a law would certainly violate the individual protections guaranteed by the Second Amendment, thereby making the US constitution irrelevant in our time.
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